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The Futility of Gun Control as Crime Control

Summer 2019

The college campus is not immune to the debate on gun control. As we saw in Timothy Hsiao’s essay on concealed carrying of firearms (AQ Winter 2018), a moral case can be made for a gun in the professor’s briefcase. The empirical work on the effects of concealed carry lend support to Hsiao’s argument, as there has been no proof of a systematic relationship between crime and the issuance of gun permits.1 One must keep in mind, however, that the legality of concealed carry may vary with the campus as it depends on state (and sometimes city) law as well as the college’s/university’s rules.

Whatever the link between concealed carry and crime, there is an indisputable connection between the prevalence of firearms in the United States and killings. Nearly three out of four killings in this country are

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